Mike had spent his career, particularly the decade since 9/11, on the tactical edge of battle. He had never directed a large organization before, and he made some of the same mistakes I’d made as a new DIA director in 1991, including not properly engaging the workforce before undertaking a major reorganization. He could have rectified the situation, but he didn’t address the civilian workforce’s concerns when they were brought to him, and he made matters worse by increasingly demanding that civilians behave like uniformed service members. Stories started leaking out of DIA that he was using analysts to chase down crazy conspiracy theories, which the workforce had dubbed “Flynn facts.” He also clashed with his boss in the Pentagon, Mike Vickers, and publicly criticized the president’s policy decisions, asserting that the president should refer to terrorists as “Islamic extremists.” That made sense from a warfighting perspective, but the president was also concerned with maintaining relationships with Islamic governments around the world that had repudiated the terrorists. For Mike Vickers, Flynn’s insubordination became too much to bear; for me, it was his impact on the workforce at DIA that led to our mutual decision to make a change.
In late 2013, we met with Flynn in Vickers’s office in the Pentagon to let him know we were ending his tour a year early. He could remain until August 2014, which would allow him to retire with the grade and pay of a lieutenant general. He seemed to take it well and retired the following summer. I had a lot of respect for what Mike had done during his years of service, and I didn’t hold it against him that things hadn’t worked out at DIA.
So I was taken aback in December 2015 when pictures of Mike sitting at dinner with Vladimir Putin surfaced in the media. From his public statements that followed, I gathered that he felt an affinity with the Russians when it came to dealing with terrorists in a tough way. He even talked about meeting privately with Russian intelligence to discuss fighting the Islamic State, another decision I was uneasy with. When he’d been DIA director, I’d cautioned Mike to be wary of the Russians attempting to woo him, as they had attempted with me when I’d been DIA director. Looking at pictures of Mike sitting with Putin at dinner, I wondered if the Russian courtship had been more appealing to Mike in his retirement. Regardless, he knew that taking Russian government money compromised him personally, particularly since he was consulting with several Republican presidential campaigns at the time. In February, he officially joined Mr. Trump’s campaign, bringing his connection to RT and an angry, fiery edge that he’d acquired sometime after retiring in 2014.
Meanwhile, Mr. Trump’s campaign interests continued to align more with Russia’s, and specifically with Putin’s. In the first year of his campaign, Trump boasted many times that Putin was someone he could make deals with, and pointed out that Putin had prior positive experiences working with businessmen turned national leaders, particularly Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi and German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. The two began a public courtship in the media, and in July 2015, Trump announced that if he was elected president, Putin would extradite Snowden to the United States, because Putin respected him but not Obama. In September on Fox News, he said of Putin, “I will tell you that I think in terms of leadership, he is getting an ‘A,’ and our president is not doing so well.” In October, he supported Putin’s aggression in Syria, telling the Guardian, “He’s going to want to bomb ISIS because he doesn’t want ISIS going into Russia and so he’s going to want to bomb ISIS. Vladimir Putin is going to want to really go after ISIS, and if he doesn’t it’ll be a big shock to everybody.”
In December, as the Russian social media trolls began to focus on helping candidate Trump’s cause, Putin seemed to endorse Trump, calling him “a colorful and talented man,” and indicating that he would welcome the closer relations with the United States that might come with Trump’s election. Shortly after, Trump had an on-air conversation with Joe Scarborough of MSNBC, during which Scarborough reminded him that Putin was someone “who kills journalists, political opponents, and invades countries.” “He’s running his country and at least he’s a leader, unlike what we have in this country,” Trump responded. Scarborough reiterated, “He kills journalists who don’t agree with him.” Trump said, “Well, I think our country does plenty of killing also, Joe.”
Then, in January, when a British inquiry found that “the FSB operation to kill [former KGB agent Alexander] Litvinenko was probably approved by Mr. Patrushev and also by President Putin,” Trump stated publicly, “He says he didn’t do it; many people say it wasn’t him. So who knows who did it?”
Getting its target audience to conclude that facts and truth are “unknowable” is the true objective of any disinformation campaign. Climate change deniers aren’t trying to convince people that surveys they commissioned are better than those agreed upon by the vast majority of scientists. Antigovernment conspiracy theorists aren’t really trying to convince people that some towns in the Midwest are governed under Sharia law, or that Jade Helm was an attempt by Obama to come for their guns. If someone actually believes the falsehood, that’s a bonus, but the primary objective is to get readers or viewers to throw their hands up and give up on “facts.” Do vaccines cause autism? Maybe. Was Senator Ted Cruz’s father involved with President Kennedy’s assassination? Anything’s possible. Is Hillary Clinton running a child-sex ring out of the basement of a DC pizza parlor? Who knows?
In February, Flynn joined the Trump campaign, and on March 1, voters in eleven states went to the primary polls. Mr. Trump won seven states outright and finished a close-enough second in Senator Ted Cruz’s home state of Texas. He took a considerable lead in committed Republican delegates just as Secretary Clinton extended her lead over Senator Bernie Sanders in committed Democratic delegates, and the Kremlin decided to fully support Mr. Trump’s election bid. Putin didn’t formally endorse Trump, which the Russians believed would hurt his chances at election, but RT anchors began full-throated praise, particularly targeting the base of voters most incensed at politicians in Washington. They pushed the message that while Mr. Trump would be the nominee of the Republican Party, he was nonetheless a complete and welcome outsider. That was music to the ears of Trump’s campaign, and he quickly returned the favor, repeating at public events and in press interviews that the United States was paying too much into NATO—the alliance specifically established to counter the Soviets—and that it should reconsider its obligations to defend NATO nations who weren’t paying “their fair share.” RT jumped on the story, reporting, “Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump slammed NATO on the campaign trail this week, saying he can live with breaking up the military alliance, which he calls ‘obsolete.’”
In April, Mr. Trump first used the phrase “lying, crooked Hillary” to refer to his likely opponent in the primary election. RT, Fox News, and paid and unpaid trolls across social media latched on to the moniker. Russia and the Trump campaign seemed to be quite in sync, but that didn’t necessarily mean they were colluding—coordinating their efforts behind closed doors. They may simply have had a lot in common: a strong dislike for both the Washington political establishment and Hillary Clinton personally; a proclivity for social media, particularly Twitter, which meant they’d end up sharing each other’s ideas on the internet; and a genuine delight in wallowing in conspiracy theories.
As spring turned into summer in 2016—and as Mr. Trump promoted pro-Russian lobbyist Paul Manafort to campaign chairman—the US IC was well aware that Russia was trolling social media networks, and we knew that RT and Sputnik were spouting propaganda to large American audiences, but none of these efforts seemed radically different from what they’d done before. The social media trolling was a new phenomenon but also a tactic that had backfired on Russian interests during the 2014 Ukraine elections, largely because it incited threats of violence that had closed polls in Russian-controlled areas. RT had grown its audience considerably since 2012 but was pushing the same sort of messages and was once again ta
rgeting the right as much as the left, hosting a Green Party debate on May 9 and a Libertarian Party debate on May 12, and pushing the agendas of both. That effort served both to undermine the two-party system and to take votes away from Secretary Clinton. So while it looked as if the Trump campaign and Russian propaganda were working in tandem, I didn’t see any evidence at the time that there was direct coordination between them. I was, however, convinced that the Russians needed to be confronted about their cyber intrusions into American parties, campaigns, and state electoral databases. On May 18, I announced during a cybersecurity event at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington that the IC had indications of Russian hackers targeting presidential campaigns—our first public warning shot at Russia, six months before Election Day.
Beyond being the first to call out Russian interference publicly, I continued to stay away from any involvement in the ongoing election shenanigans. I figured at the time that the last thing our country needed was any appearance that the Intelligence Community was involved in partisan politics. As someone who’d served as a political appointee in both Republican and Democrat administrations, I didn’t have a personal dog in the fight. At the same time, I was deeply and personally bothered by the divisive rhetoric that continued to be a hallmark of the campaigning. My biggest concern with the political rhetoric from the Republican campaigns and Russian propaganda was that the demonizing of minority groups in the United States was having a tangible impact on how we treated one another as Americans. In May, Georgetown University published a study on escalating violence against Muslim Americans. They reported that anti-Muslim political rhetoric first escalated in August 2015, and then September saw a surge in violence against Muslims, which kept rising. As the study noted:
Anti-Muslim attacks surged once more in December 2015. There were 53 total attacks that month, 17 of which targeted mosques and Islamic schools and 5 of which targeted Muslim homes. By comparison, when the presidential election season began just 9 months earlier, there were only 2 anti-Muslim attacks. Attacks on Muslims during this month constitute approximately 1/3 of all attacks last year. In fact, in December 2015, anti-Muslim attacks occurred almost daily and often multiple times a day.
That troubled me professionally, as well as personally, and the rhetoric was only becoming more inflammatory as candidate Trump again called for a ban on refugees from Islamic countries entering the United States, and pondered aloud banning all travel to this country from Muslim nations. He and several GOP congressional members castigated President Obama for not referring to terrorist groups as “radical Islamists,” as though uttering that phrase would change anything on the battlefield.
At the time, I was primarily focused on leaving the IC positioned for the next generation to take the reins and excel, particularly when it came to technology and the exceptional people of the IC. I was challenging attendees at the Geospatial Intelligence Forum to “not be afraid to fail” in the pursuit of technological breakthroughs. I asked the IC Women’s Summit in March and the African American and Hispanic Hiring Summit in May to find ways to encourage diversity. On Wednesday, June 8, I met with the IC Pride group and was again taken with their joy at finding a community within the IC. They were so happy that after years of living under draconian rules, they could finally live openly, honest about who they were, without fear of losing their clearances, jobs, or social standing.
That feeling came crashing down four days later, on Sunday morning, June 12, when the LGBT community was targeted with violence—yet again—when a man opened fire inside Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, killing forty-nine people and wounding fifty-three. No event since 9/11 had affected me as deeply as Orlando did. It was just so unfair for a community that had lived under oppression and fear for so long to be targeted by someone with such hate, and the anguish of the moment was even more intense because I’d just celebrated service with a segment of that community, one I thought of as family, because they were also intelligence officers.
On Tuesday, June 14, I met with the national security team and President Obama in Treasury Department headquarters for an update on the progress we’d made to counter the Islamic State in the ungoverned spaces in Iraq and Syria. After it ended, we walked out to a press conference for the president to talk about the parts of our meeting he could discuss publicly. As is typical, two other leaders (this time Secretary of the Treasury Jack Lew, our host for the meeting, and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Joe Dunford) and I stood behind him. In these situations, I always try to do my best “potted plant” impression, standing motionless and expressionless, becoming part of the scenery. Just before we stepped out, the president pulled Joe and me aside and told us he wanted to apologize ahead of time, because he tried never to put us on display for a political statement. As I stood listening while he began speaking to the press, channeling my inner bonsai, I wondered what he had meant.
Halfway through the conference, the president’s tone changed as he addressed the criticism that he refused to use the phrase “radical Islam” to label terrorists. “We’re starting to see where this kind of rhetoric and loose talk and sloppiness about who exactly we’re fighting, where this can lead us,” he said. “We now have proposals from the presumptive Republican nominee for president of the United States to bar all Muslims from immigrating to America.” He asked, “Where does this stop? The Orlando killer, one of the San Bernardino killers, the Fort Hood killer, they were all US citizens. Are we going to start treating all Muslim Americans differently? Are we going to start subjecting them to special surveillance?”
As he continued to speak, I felt my thoughts carried away from that auditorium. I thought of the Muslim American leaders I’d met with, of their patriotism and their fear of how the country they loved had treated the communities they represented. In the press conference, the president was saying that if we implied we were at war with an entire religion, we’d be doing the Islamic State’s work for them, and if we demonized Muslims and other groups in the United States, we’d lose sight of what this nation stood for. We’d regretted the times in our past when we’d given in to fear and lashed out at minority groups of American citizens. If we abandoned our values, the terrorists will have won. He talked about diversity as a great strength of this country, about the outpouring of support in Orlando from all corners and all walks of life. I thought about our IC Pride group. My colleagues had for years hidden their true selves, not for personal gain, but to serve—a sacrifice I couldn’t imagine making. America’s intelligence force worked, fought, and sacrificed in the shadows, without expecting praise, and these exceptional people had finally gained the ability to live openly as who they really were, and that freedom and joy had reverted to fear again so quickly and so savagely. The president finished with a message about how our military members supported each other regardless of what they looked like or whom they loved. “Those are the values that ISIL is trying to destroy,” he said, “and we shouldn’t help them do it.” Our military had come a long way to arrive at a place where that statement was true and could be acknowledged publicly. I’d been there on that journey.
When the president finished, we retired to an anteroom, and he bid quick farewells to Joe and Jack. When he turned to me, I started to lose it. Tears welling, I managed to babble something about how proud I was of him. He pulled me into a hug for just a moment, and we then went our separate ways back to work. In the car I couldn’t help but think about how far the president and I had come since our first meeting in the Oval Office, when we’d chatted about lifting weights and doing cardio on alternating days, which is when I guess he decided I would be okay to hire as his DNI.
I went back to Liberty Crossing, satisfied that I could focus on the community for my final seven months instead of being caught up in the election. On May 26, Donald Trump clinched the Republican nomination, and on June 6, Hillary Clinton clinched the Democratic nomination. I was thinking about how I would dance quietly off the stage
on January 20, hoping that no one really noticed I was leaving. Events of the next two months would prove both of those to be extremely naïve wishes.
On July 5, Jim Comey held a press conference to read a statement about the results of the FBI investigation into Secretary Clinton’s emails. I didn’t know anything about this beforehand, and I consider it a good thing that I wasn’t told, as it demonstrates the independence the FBI has with its investigations, particularly when US persons are involved. Calling a press conference was an unusual step, but former president Bill Clinton had complicated the situation on June 27, when he was seen boarding Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s plane in Phoenix. When news of the meeting—which both said was unrelated to the investigation—leaked out, Attorney General Lynch appeared to be compromised and therefore unable to make an unbiased decision about prosecuting Secretary Clinton. So rather than quietly passing FBI findings and recommendations to the Justice Department behind closed doors, as would typically be done, Jim Comey opted for a press conference.
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